And your hairy butt....YEAH

I can't stop watching this. I'm blown away by Samberg's sheer talent, and how perfectly he treats that silly statement last week by Ahmadinejad. And instead of resorting to tired homophobic crap, Samberg perfectly nails the satire. This is the America that makes me smile. And how quickly did they put this together?

No miracles today, sorry

You know how, every time you hear that an animal is endangered, you sort of assume that someone's taking care of it, and it'll end up like the bald eagles I now see fairly frequently along the Kootenai River?

Not so.

India's tigers will require a miracle to avoid extinction, says Valmik Thapar, a renowned Indian tiger expert. The tigers' numbers have more than halved just in the last five years.

[Thapar] said the tiger's survival was dependent on rapid action, reform and strong protection of the animals and their habitat.

But instead, Thapar said, the government was placing the animals under greater risk with a new law giving people rights over forest resources and advocating the co-existence of tigers and man.

Thapar has written fifteen books on tigers and made about twenty documentaries, many of them showing his seven-year interaction with a tigress he named "Macchli", or fish, due to a fish-like mark on her cheek. He was also the first to document how male tigers behave in the tiger family unit. But now he has concluded that his life is a failure because he has failed to save India's tigers.

He says, of his career:

"The most moving and memorable time was with a tigress and her three tiny cubs. I watched her in the early morning sun for two hours, it brought tears to my eyes. I wept in joy -- the joy of the devotion of a mother to her little ones," he said.

"But if you look at it today, those mothers are being killed and the cubs are dying as the mothers don't return home."

Am I the only one who finds comfort in knowing that such wild creatures exist, even though I never see them? Am I the only one who finds their plight more pressing than the latest Britney Spears cr*tch shot? Given the recent Giant Otter swarm to this blog, I don't think I am.

But can you feel the loneliness that must dog Thapar as he absorbs the life of these creatures, only to watch them be carelessly destroyed? Making documentary after documentary, writing book after book, running around with your hair on fire trying to tell people they are losing part of their world, only to watch these tigers be poached for their skin? Hunted into extinction?

If only his words here were still true:



I guess, ultimately, it doesn't matter as long as we have our comfortable lives in the suburbs, our iPhones and good pizza. And I'm serious about that. Isn't that the lesson of the modern age? I may be little better than the next guy on that score. But is that real? Is it the truth? Or is the same indifference that's killing the tigers of a piece with the emerging reality that we may be indulging ourselves to death?

Sorry for the downer, guys. I'll try to post something a little more uplifting later. But this article just sent me right into the mental crapper.

Wherein Trailhead meets her political hero, issues queries about habeas corpus and plays groupie

So we arrived in Montana at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning after -- get this -- ten stops on the road from Portland. The first was to fix a wire running from our vehicle to our trailer. The second was a dramatic and unexpected halt in order to secure my kayak, which was about to skitter off the top of Tony's van and into oncoming traffic. The rest were an assortment of pee breaks, meal breaks, and a brief interlude in Spokane to buy a toilet and some zero-VOC paint.

At length, we drove the half-mile up the gravel road to the house. That we arrived in the middle of the night was of no importance to the children, who thought it was an excellent time to play an entire game of pool until the road-weary adults herded them downstairs to bed. I rose at about ten, stuck my hair into a clip and drove into town to get some breakfast food. At the checkout counter, my fatigue-narrowed eyes lit upon a small entry in the upper left hand corner of the local newspaper:

"Senator Jon Tester will be in Libby Saturday, where he will host an afternoon 'meet and greet' for residents. The gathering, at the pavillion at River Front Park pavillion, is free and open to the public...."

Oh my.

Even though this isn't really a political blog, I'm a total political junkie. I don't write much about politics because, let's face it, that's kind of gilding the lily in light of the vibrant political blogosphere that's churned along for some time without the slightest contribution from me. I assume readers will be unsurprised to learn that I'm somewhat of a leftist, and those who know me understand the effect that little blurb would have had on me.

I've been a huge fan of Jon Tester since the Montana Senate primary last year. He's an organic farmer and environmentalist. In spite of meeting a fook of a lot of politicians in my life, Tester was the first one who impressed me enough to induce me to make a campaign contribution. (Jim Webb was the second.) I followed his campaign religiously. There was simply no way I was going to pass up this opportunity.

He didn't disappoint me in the slightest.

I've met three senators, three or four governors, a former United States attorney general, mayors of cities large and small, a bunch of federal and state judges and politicos of all stripes, and until I met Tester, I'd never met one without a certain veneer of artificiality. Despite being a fervent consumer of all things political, I generally dislike the practitioners of it. The fledgling, baby politicians at my old law firm were an interpersonal irritant. I found them insufferable, with their canned smiles and the pablum that passed for conversation because, oh my God, we can't possibly say anything that would piss off someone, somewhere, at some time.

These are not really my kind of folk. I have no use for them, and they had little use for me. Compared to them, see, I'm a loose cannon.

So on some level I was prepared for disillusionment. But it never arrived. Tester and his trademark flattop swept briskly out of his car and into the pavilion and immediately began talking about renewable energy. Then he took all manner of questions from the group, including some obviously repetitive queries that he simply answered again. He issued blunt, straightforward opinions and rattled off obscure statistics about this or that. There was no equivocation. He fielded questions about trade, immigration, veterans' benefits and eminent domain.

I raised my hand. He smiled and nodded at me.

"Habeas corpus," I said. It wasn't a question so much as a statement.

"I can tell you right now I support the restoration of habeas corpus and I'll vote for that."

This was right after being grilled by a Vietnam vet with whom I'd just engaged in some light disagreements about the wisdom of the Geneva Convention, of all things. No equivocation, no preface about winning the War on Terra, just "I support that."

So afterward I waited to shake his hand with a few other people. Tester lost a few fingers as a kid in a confrontation with a meat grinder, and I noticed up close that's on his left hand, not his right. When my turn arrived, I told him I was a supporter, and that while a lot of Democrats seemed to have replaced their spines with silly string in recent times, he hadn't disappointed me once since November and I hoped he continued on his current trajectory.

He gave me a huge smile and we exchanged a few further pleasantries. You can tell it's early enough in the game that he still genuinely enjoys hearing from an ardent supporter. The overall impression I got was that the same guy I was talking to would be pretty much the same guy who chatted with his family later that week. He was refreshingly real. And his intelligence and the depth of his knowledge was obvious.

In short, I felt I'd just met a guy who will shape up to be one of the great public servants of my time. It was a pleasure.

And no, I didn't get a picture. This is because Mr. T was headed back to the truck to get my camera battery, which we'd inadvertently left in the car. He was supposed to run to the car, grab my camera, put the battery back in and discreetly take a picture while I was meeting the good Senator.

But nooooooo. He had to stop and gab with some folks on the way back, and completely missed the window of opportunity. Ordinarily he would have spent some time in the doghouse for such a thing, but I was pretty stoked from meeting the latest in a long line of great public figures to hail from the American West.

I wouldn't want to follow this guy

I'm a little late to this party, but I absolutely love this for all the expected reasons. But mostly because it's a pleasure to watch this happen to someone.



Update:

He won the whole damn salami:



Yay! I'm a fan. I just want to hear more of that voice.

Why not?

I have an affinity for people who make epic journeys for no particular reason other than "it was there." I have a long-term goal myself to thru-hike a long-distance trail -- either the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, or the Pacific Crest Trail. (I'm section-hiking the PCT in Oregon, so it probably will be one of the other two.) Though it may seem patently silly to hike, bike, run, ski or swim an outrageous distance just to do it, I can't help but feel that, like art, sometimes an epic journey ought to be undertaken for its own sake.

That's why I'm following this guy.

Piranhas, toothpick fish and a tidal bore called the pororoca are upcoming obstacles. Yikes.

Not too shabby

For his work bringing attention to the climate crisis, Al Gore has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. It's not a secret that I think global warming is the most critical issue the world faces, and I don't think I've concealed my admiration for Mr. Gore. I'm delighted with this nomination.

And I enthusiastically concur with this sentiment from Shakespeare's Sister:

Cool. And now think about how he was supposed to be our president and try not to collapse into a wailing heap with a great gnashing of teeth and dramatic fist-clenching.

I grieve that, deeply. But I haven't given up yet.

That's a topic for a whole other post, of course.

I'm not happy

One of my favorite writers -- and heck, speakers -- of all time is in the hospital with breast cancer. Sixty-two is far too young an age to be doing anything but raising hell, and I'm taking it personally that fate is peeing all over my hopes in that regard for Molly Ivins. Right now, at least. On the other hand, Ivins has raised enough hell in her sixty-two years for thousands of us, so maybe she's entitled to a bit of a rest for now.

Get better, Molly. Please.

Mr. Tester goes to Washington. Poor thing.

As much as I wanted Jon Tester to be elected to represent Montana in the United States Senate, I feel a little sorry for him now that his election has come to pass.

Because now he has to leave Montana and go spend most of his time in Washington, D.C.

Bleh.

I'm a person for whom urban life loses more allure with every passing year. At first I thought this was evidence of a growing introversion chipping away at my longstanding need to be in the thick of human interaction. But that's not really the case. The reality for me is that, paradoxically, I often feel more isolated in the city where I live most of the time than at my place in Teenytown, Montana.

Here, our neighbors are fifteen feet away and we speak rarely. There, our only neighbors on the mountain are about a quarter mile down the gravel road, and we have dinner together regularly when we're there. Once every couple of days, their year-old Newfoundland will trot up the road and up the stairs to our kitchen for a visit, an ear scratch, and a doggie biscuit. Despite the reputation of rural folk as close-minded and insular, my experience in Montana is that the openness of the land seems to parallel an openness of its residents to other people.

My sympathy for Senator-elect Tester is, I acknowledge, an act of rank projection. For all I know, Jon Tester can't wait to hightail his flattop to D.C. and start frequenting the cocktail party circuit. (Though somehow I doubt it.) But I hope the good Senator, who after 8 years in politics still "does some of his best thinking" on his tractor, can find enough time -- for his own sake -- to spend on his organic farm during the next six years.